Mary Beard is one of Britain's most prominent classical scholars and public intellectuals. She’s one of those rare people who seems as much at home in academia as she is in front of a television camera. She's a rigorous scholar who has a real talent for public engagement and is never afraid to challenge received wisdom whether it is about the ancient world or about the modern one.
She’s a Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her academic work focuses on ancient Rome, its culture, politics, religion and society, and how we interpret and misinterpret it today. She's the classics editor at the Times Literary Supplement, where she has written for decades. She's presented several BBC documentaries about ancient Rome, and she’s written a bunch of books about history for the lay reader.
Here’s a look at a few of her books:
Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town uses the famous buried city as a window into everyday Roman life. Beard chooses to focus not on the dramatic destruction of Pompeii, but on what the remains tell us about how ordinary people actually lived, their homes, businesses, social lives, and habits.
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome is probably her most celebrated popular work. Instead of presenting the history of Ancient Rome as a chronological narrative, she asks the bigger question of how Rome became Rome, how a small city on the Tiber came to dominate much of the known world.
She explores how the Romans thought about themselves and what they saw as their role in the world. She covers a thousand years of history and casts a fresh light on the basics of Roman society from slavery to running water, to democracy, social mobility, and religious debate. This book challenges a lot of popular assumptions about Roman history, and the sheer sweep of the narrative makes it one of the definitive histories of Ancient Rome.
Emperor of Rome is a sweeping account of the social and political world of the men who ruled the Roman empire, from Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) to Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE). In this fascinating book, Mary Beard asks what the life of a Roman Emperor was actually like, at home, at the races, on his travels, even on his way to heaven. She introduces wives and lovers, rivals and slaves, court jesters and soldiers and the many ordinary folk whose lives these men impacted.
Women & Power: A Manifesto is a slim but punchy book adapted from two lectures in which Mary Beard laid out the long history of women being silenced in public life all the way back to Homer and classical antiquity, arguing that the general discomfort with women in positions of power has very ancient roots.
Civilizations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith is a book about art, particularly the depiction of the human form across cultures and through the centuries. Beard takes the reader from the gigantic stone heads carved by the Olmec in Central America, to the statues and pottery of the ancient Greeks, to the terracotta army of the first emperor of China, to Angkor Wat, to the exquisite calligraphy of Islamic mosques...asking what it means to see with the eye of faith.
Running through all her popular writing is a suspicion of easy narratives, a democratic instinct to recover the voices of ordinary and marginalized people, and a willingness to say "we don't really know" when the evidence is thin. She's also genuinely funny, which is rarer in history writing than it should be.